Film Review | Diva in Spiral Mode

Writer-director Pablo Larraín has made a specialty and cottage industry creating biopics about mythic women on the verge and/or in crisis. The Chilean-born auteur has thus far chronicled the politically spun lives in Spencer (Lady Di) and in Jackie (O), and now shifts over into high culture land with the impressive if flawed Maria (Callas).

In a sense, the collision of fates and dramatic dimensions for all three could be the stuff of opera, although Maria (with a stunning performance from Angelina Jolie as the protagonist) is the most definitively “operatic” of the trio. In those terms, Maria can be best described as a tragedy as conveyed in the last chapter — or third act — of Callas’s life, with legendary career highlights folded into the narrative.

As with last year’s overly ballyhooed Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, Maria tells its character’s life story from the perspective and backward-glancing prism of the artist’s final phase. The prominent milieu in Steven Knight’s script deals with Callas facing the faded glory of her voice, the haunting specter of her former legendary status, and the ghostly memory of a cruel mother who forced her to sing and make other compromising positions for Nazi officers back in Athens. There is also the matter of a mercurial but deep relationship with Aristotle Onassis.

All of these sinister forces have driven her to excessive use of prescription drugs and hallucinatory states which lend a surreal air to the film’s mise-en-scène. As she says, fatalistically and with twinges of mortality-awareness, “Tick tock, tick tock; my man is dead; my voice is gone. What am I going to do?”

All is not dour or downward spiraling, however; many of the film’s most glorious moments come in the form of black-and-white vignettes demonstrating Callas’s mastery on the world’s finest stages and fleeting moments of romantic/emotional glow, if tempered by Callas’s cool offstage composure. And some of the most striking scenes in the film involve snippets of the historic diva at her best intercut with the fading diva attempting but failing to match her past self.

For all of its considerable merits — including the very fact of its giving a vibrant mainstream showcase to the typically marginalized and esoteric opera world — the film sometimes loses its way and succumbs to distracting moments of sentimentality. That’s an ever-present danger, in opera, cinema, and life.

A primary reason to celebrate Maria is its Maria. In one of her most powerful yet restrained performances to date, Jolie embodies her legendary character and conveys her fierce pride mixed with vulnerability — and does it without lunging into scene-munching histrionics. She gives credible veracity to the close-up singing scenes (during shoots, the well-rehearsed Jolie sang along with Callas recordings) and imbues this complex character with a palpable emotional undertow. Regarding the Maestro/Maria comparisons, let’s just say that Jolie becomes Callas while Bradley Cooper as Bernstein stayed largely in the realm of “I am Bradley Cooper!” bravado.

(On a local note, Jolie will be the subject of an evening-length tribute at the 2025 Santa Barbara International Film Festival. See story here.)

On a larger cultural front, Maria takes its rightful place on a list of notable recent big-screen sensations — including Maestro and Todd Fields’s satirical gem Tár – dealing with music in high cultural settings, and with respectable portions of actual musical content. Could these films help to spread the gospel of serious music in the mostly mass cultural public marketplace? That hopeful result remains to be seen, but the prospects are enticing. One more thing: Although Maria is available now in living rooms everywhere, courtesy of Netflix, this is one film best appreciated on a big screen with a full-bodied sound system. It’s impolite, after all, to go for a bathroom or beverage break at the opera. Ditto the movies, when serious business is at hand.